Charlotte Walsh Likes To Win - Hardcover
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“The essential political novel for the 2018 midterms.” —Salon
“This political novel is comically accurate.” —New York Post
From Jo Piazza, the bestselling author of The Knock Off, How to Be Married, and Fitness Junkie, comes an exciting, insightful novel about what happens when a woman wants it all—political power, a happy marriage, and happiness—but isn’t sure just how much she’s willing to sacrifice to get it.
Charlotte Walsh is running for Senate in the most important race in the country during a midterm election that will decide the balance of power in Congress. Still reeling from a presidential election that shocked and divided the country and inspired by the chance to make a difference, she’s left behind her high-powered job in Silicon Valley and returned, with her husband Max and their three young daughters, to her downtrodden Pennsylvania hometown to run in the Rust Belt state.
Once the campaign gets underway, Charlotte is blindsided by just how dirty her opponent is willing to fight, how harshly she is judged by the press and her peers, and how exhausting it becomes to navigate a marriage with an increasingly ambivalent and often resentful husband. When the opposition uncovers a secret that could threaten not just her campaign but everything Charlotte holds dear, she has to decide just how badly she wants to win and at what cost.
A searing, suspenseful story of political ambition, marriage, class, sexual politics, and infidelity, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win is an insightful portrait of what it takes for a woman to run for national office in America today. In a dramatic political moment like no other with more women running for office than ever before, Jo Piazza’s novel is timely, engrossing, and perfect for readers on both sides of the aisle.
Elle: “Best Books to Read This Summer”
Goop: “15 Books We’re Reading This Summer”
People: “Best Summer Books”
PopSugar: “25 Best New Books to Put in Your Beach Bag This Summer”
Refinery29: “Brilliant Books to Bring to the Beach This Summer”
Vulture: “18 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer”
“The essential political novel for the 2018 midterms.” —Salon
“This political novel is comically accurate.” —New York Post
From Jo Piazza, the bestselling author of The Knock Off, How to Be Married, and Fitness Junkie, comes an exciting, insightful novel about what happens when a woman wants it all—political power, a happy marriage, and happiness—but isn’t sure just how much she’s willing to sacrifice to get it.
Charlotte Walsh is running for Senate in the most important race in the country during a midterm election that will decide the balance of power in Congress. Still reeling from a presidential election that shocked and divided the country and inspired by the chance to make a difference, she’s left behind her high-powered job in Silicon Valley and returned, with her husband Max and their three young daughters, to her downtrodden Pennsylvania hometown to run in the Rust Belt state.
Once the campaign gets underway, Charlotte is blindsided by just how dirty her opponent is willing to fight, how harshly she is judged by the press and her peers, and how exhausting it becomes to navigate a marriage with an increasingly ambivalent and often resentful husband. When the opposition uncovers a secret that could threaten not just her campaign but everything Charlotte holds dear, she has to decide just how badly she wants to win and at what cost.
A searing, suspenseful story of political ambition, marriage, class, sexual politics, and infidelity, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win is an insightful portrait of what it takes for a woman to run for national office in America today. In a dramatic political moment like no other with more women running for office than ever before, Jo Piazza’s novel is timely, engrossing, and perfect for readers on both sides of the aisle.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Jo Piazza is an award-winning journalist and editor who has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Daily News (New York), New York magazine, Glamour, Marie Claire, Elle, and Salon. She has appeared on CNN, NPR, Fox News, BBC, and MSNBC. Jo received a Masters in Journalism from Columbia, a Masters in Religious Studies from NYU, and a bachelor’s in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. The author of The Knock Off, How to Be Married, Fitness Junkies, and Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win, she currently lives in San Francisco with her husband, their giant dog, and a baby boy.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Charlotte Walsh Likes To Win CHAPTER 1 July 15, 2017 479 days to Election Day
Tell people one true thing before you tell them a lie. Then it will be easier for them to believe the lie.
It wasn’t the best advice Marty Walsh ever gave to his daughter Charlotte, but it had stuck with her for almost forty years. Marty had been a garbage collector by trade, though he insisted “sanitation specialist” had a smarter ring to it. He wasn’t a successful man by most people’s standards and he died drunk in his bed before his fiftieth birthday. Now his daughter was running for the United States Senate and Marty’s words held a new utility for her.
Charlotte hadn’t expected her campaign to begin with an interrogation—an aggressive one at that—but the questions just kept coming.
“Have you ever used any drugs besides pot?”
“No.”
“Paid any undocumented workers under the table?”
“Nope.”
“Ever killed anyone?”
“Not yet.”
“Ever get an abortion?”
“No.”
“Infidelity in your marriage? Affairs? Secret ex-husband?”
“I love my husband. We don’t have anything to hide.” One of those things is true. Charlotte punctuated her sentence with a chuckle, hoping the laughter would sooth her nerves and add confidence to her answer.
Josh Pratt, who if all went well today would sign on to be her campaign manager, twisted his mouth in a way that told Charlotte he wasn’t sure he believed her. He had a tiny blob of something yellow, maybe mustard, on the side of his thin lips. As he asked his questions, Charlotte had a hard time focusing on anything except for the golden dribble.
I’m running for national political office, she wanted to answer back. Ask me my thoughts on immigration, on the flat tax, on school vouchers, abortion rights. How much do I think we can raise the minimum wage? Can I bring more jobs to Pennsylvania? Will I create more affordable housing? Will I fight for college tuition assistance? What do I think about trade with the Chinese? Why does my marriage matter?
“You’re thinking, ‘Why does it matter?’ Why does your husband matter?” Josh read her mind. “Your husband matters. Your marriage matters. As a woman, you bear the burden of having to appear to be charismatic, smart, well-groomed, nice, but not too nice. If you’re married, you need to look happily married. If you have kids, you should be the mother of the year.”
“Goddammit. It’s 2017. There are plenty of women in Congress. A woman ran for president. It shouldn’t matter that I don’t have a penis.” Charlotte rolled her eyes. “It’s unbelievable that we have to deal with that kind of shit anymore.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but it matters a lot.” Josh shot her a stoic stare. “You do still have to deal with this shit. No one likes to say that out loud, but it’s true. You’re running in a state that’s never elected a woman to the Senate or as governor. That should tell you something.”
“Tug Slaughter is a serial philanderer,” Charlotte fired back at Josh. Pennsylvania’s longtime incumbent senator Ted “Tug” Slaughter had been married three times—his current wife was thirty-five years younger than he. The man was a walking cliché. For more than forty years, Slaughter had reigned as the senior senator from the state. Most men in Congress would be easy to miss in a crowd. Not Slaughter. Pushing eighty, the man still oozed raw ego. He was known to strip his shirt off and perform sit-ups onstage at events. Just last month he’d climbed the trestle of the Black Bridge in Marshfield Station with a pack of teenagers and leapt into the icy Delaware River below. Last winter he announced that he donated a kidney to a complete stranger he’d met at an Eagles game.
“It’s true, Tug does more cocktail waitresses than he does lawmaking, but he’s not the one who needs to create a legitimate candidacy. You do.” Josh had an answer for everything.
“That’s bullshit.”
Charlotte drummed her nails on her desktop, an expensive slab of glass through which she could see her boot tapping the wooden floor. She’d flown Josh here to Palo Alto from Philadelphia on her dime to convince him to run her campaign. He’d insisted on first class because he knew she could afford it, and Charlotte took this as a sign that he didn’t think he needed to impress her. All the right people told Charlotte that hiring Josh, a political wunderkind with four consecutive congressional wins under his belt, could give her a solid shot at winning. She needed him more than he needed her money, though she knew that if he said yes to working with her, she would be paying him in the high six figures for a little more than a year.
Josh paused and smiled. “You curse like a dockworker. You don’t look like someone with such a foul mouth, with your expensive linen suit, sitting in this glass-walled aquarium in the heart of Silicon Valley.”
She was suddenly conscious of what she looked like to him. At forty-seven, Charlotte was often complimented on the fact that she had aged well, and she’d heard it enough that she allowed it to be something she took pride in. She had what her mother once described as a plain face and a sturdy build, meaning she had broad shoulders and a flat chest that persisted into adulthood. She knew her hair was her best feature, more chestnut than brown, with strawberry highlights and just a few strands of silver she easily extracted at the roots. After half a lifetime of feeling insecure about her looks, in her thirties she’d learned to accentuate her best features and had come to see herself as pretty but not beautiful. She knew the distinction had made it easier for her to succeed in a male-dominated industry.
Meanwhile, Charlotte thought Josh looked ten years younger than his actual age, which Google informed her was thirty-five and, with his baby face, husky belly, and enthusiastic acne sprinkled across his cheeks, nothing like the kind of man who played the kind of three-dimensional chess required to get a person elected to national office. He wore dark jeans, a blue blazer, pristine Stan Smith Adidas with black laces, and a rumpled Phillies T-shirt. It took swagger to waltz into a business meeting in sneakers with mustard on his face and Charlotte knew it gave him the upper hand.
“Well, I curse more like a teamster,” Charlotte corrected Josh. “I spent too many nights at my dad’s union meetings.” Marty Walsh might have been a drunk, but he’d been a happy drunk, and because happy drunks are endearing to children, like Santa Claus and puppets, from an early age Charlotte had wanted to be around him all the time. On evenings when her mother couldn’t get out of bed, he brought her to his union meetings and sat her on the floor while deeply angry white men—the room was always all men—cursed and complained about how the world owed them better. Years later, at Marty’s funeral, the same men had the same conversations. Back then those men were still progressive Democrats. Mistrust for authority and misplaced expectations had been the central tropes of Charlotte’s upbringing. When she closed her eyes, Charlotte could smell the Swisher Sweets and cheap beer and hear her father say: “These men work hard, Charlie. They deserve a good turn. Anyone who works an honest day deserves a good turn.” He’d had plenty of flaws, but above all Marty had been a hard worker, and it was that quality Charlotte chose to remember above the others.
“That will play well in rural PA—the cursing, the garbageman dad,” Josh said now. “Easy on the union talk though. Only 10.7 percent of Americans identify with a union these days. Play up the white-trash angle. When you run for office, your life history gets reduced to character points: ‘Daughter of trashman turns Silicon Valley executive and comes home to help voters get jobs like hers.’ That’s your brand now. It’s a better brand than ‘California millionaire who grows heirloom tomatoes, contributes to the Silver Circle of public radio, does yoga, and tries to save the spotted owl.’?”
“It’s actually the Chinook salmon we’re more concerned about these days,” Charlotte whipped back.
There were other stories Charlotte could have told Josh. Sometimes Charlotte’s mother, Annemarie, had picked up cleaning shifts at a retirement home in Scranton, scraping vomit off the bathroom walls while wearing thick yellow latex gloves. Unable to afford childcare, she’d brought Charlotte with her, placing the little girl on a stool with a book in the corner of the bathroom. But Annemarie had lost that job when they’d found out she was stealing pills from the patients. Meanwhile, Marty had been among the first laid off when Elk Hollow merged municipal services with Abington. He’d picked up some hours at the gas station before it went self-service. In his later years he’d worked as a janitor in the food services department of the University of Scranton. Some months they’d gotten food stamps that her dad was too proud to ever use at the Rainbow market, even when the electricity got shut off for five days. These were memories Charlotte had packed away into dusty boxes in her brain, and when she’d unpacked them, she’d been startled to realize she’d become the kind of woman who bought fifteen dollars worth of organic kale and thirty dollars of non-GMO chia seeds at the Menlo Park True Food Co-op. The trajectory from there to here was vertigo-inducing.
Charlotte’s eyes wandered to the couch on the other side of the room, where Leila Kelly, her executive assistant, raised her bushy eyebrows in tandem as if to ask, Do we really need this guy?
Josh glanced at his notes and continued. “You and Max Tanner have been married for twelve years, with three daughters under the age of six. You’re the COO of Humanity and he’s the head of engineering and product for the same company. How will that work exactly when you run? What will your husband be doing when you move your family to Pennsylvania?”
“Max is taking a sabbatical from the company and taking care of our girls.”
“Don’t say the word sabbatical. You sound elitist, like the kind of person who says ‘holiday’ instead of ‘vacation.’?”
Sitting in her corner office as the chief operating officer of the technology company that was single-handedly changing how the world did business, Charlotte felt assured in her use of any damn word she pleased. “We call it a sabbatical here at Humanity. We both chose to take one when I decided to run—when we decided I should run. We made a joint decision that Max would help raise our daughters so I could focus on the campaign.”
Charlotte cringed, remembering the intense marital negotiations it had taken to convince Max that her running for office and him becoming the primary caregiver for their small children would be good for them as a family. Even though she understood what he was giving up for her, she also felt vindicated that she deserved this and more from him after what he’d put her through.
“We can talk about how to spin your husband’s so-called sabbatical later,” Josh countered, wagging his head and making exaggerated air quotes with his hands around the word sabbatical. “Maybe Max works on a top secret project from home. Something with virtual reality. People love the idea of virtual reality. They have no idea what the hell it is, but they think it will change their shitty lives. Always say ‘Silicon Valley,’ never ‘San Francisco,’ by the way. San Francisco conjures up images of tie-dyed, pot-smoking, free-loving hippies and transgendered people who want to use your bathroom. ‘Silicon Valley big shot’ is more aspirational than ‘reality television star’ these days, and you and Max hopefully come with less baggage.”
Josh dredged up his next unpleasant topic. “Speaking of baggage, Max has a reputation for being a flirt. There are a few women who claim he made inappropriate remarks to them in the office.”
Adrenaline tiptoed up her spine, but outwardly Charlotte maintained total calm, a skill honed in years of boardrooms filled with other puffed-up men with expensive haircuts.
She took a sip of her lukewarm coffee, allowing her front teeth to clink against her mug. Her husband had been a flirt. It was a reflex for him, the way he made both men and women like him. He made inappropriate, vaguely vulgar jokes at the wrong times. He was a toucher. There was a time, not too long ago, when he would stroll into a team meeting and give both men and women uninvited shoulder massages during pep talks. He used to joke, “An unwanted shoulder massage is an oxymoron.” She’d made him stop telling that joke.
“All men flirt.” Charlotte held her breath and glanced again at Leila. When she made an excuse for her husband, she faltered and raised her voice an octave without intending to. “Do you have any evidence he did anything wrong? No Humanity employees will ever speak badly about Max or me. Everyone signed ironclad confidentiality agreements.”
“How do you know they’re ironclad enough?”
“I wrote them. I’m the COO.” She crossed and uncrossed her legs.
Josh’s chapped lips stretched into a smirk. “People talked to me, and if they talked to me they’ll talk to your opponent and to the press. But you make another excellent point. You have a bigger job than Max. He’s the VP of product and engineering. You’re one step away from the CEO. You run this company.” He waved his hand in an arc sweeping the room, indicating what lay beyond it—the 500,000-square-foot office complex designed by Zaha Hadid, her final project before she passed away. Outside Charlotte’s window she could see the ten-acre rooftop park with its man-made waterfalls and brutalist concrete climbing wall.
Josh continued. “I’ll bet that was tough on Max, having his wife as a boss, the big dog at one of the most powerful companies in the world.”
“My husband is a very evolved man, not a dinosaur.”
Josh rolled his eyes. “That would be a cute sound bite if we were living in Sweden. Don’t say that out loud on the campaign trail.”
He left Max behind for the moment. “Your girls. The twins, they’re five now and you conceived them through IVF?” Josh clearly enjoyed toying with people, had the look of a child dangling a pork chop in front of a starving dog as he asked his questions.
Charlotte allowed her eyes to narrow and her annoyance to rise to the surface. “Yes.”
“Designer babies.”
Don’t talk about my kids like that. I will strangle you with my bare hands. “Oh, Christ! Like hundreds of thousands of women, I had trouble getting pregnant and used modern medicine to help start our family.” Getting pregnant had been the hardest thing she’d ever done. It had convinced her over and over that she was a failure and had nearly broken her. She despised talking about it.
“Because you were old when you got pregnant? Forty-one?”
“Yes, among other things.” Charlotte glared at him. “I’d like to think you know better than to refer to a woman as old.”
Unfazed, Josh continued. “What other things?”
“My uterus sits at an inopportune angle for sperm to properly reach my eggs without assistance. I have sonograms of it, actually. Do you think we should release them on Instagram in advance of announcing the campaign? Maybe they could be our Christmas cards.”
Josh ignored her sarcasm. “IVF is an expensive procedure.”
“The company paid for it.” It was one of the things Charlotte was proudest of—not the fact tha...
Tell people one true thing before you tell them a lie. Then it will be easier for them to believe the lie.
It wasn’t the best advice Marty Walsh ever gave to his daughter Charlotte, but it had stuck with her for almost forty years. Marty had been a garbage collector by trade, though he insisted “sanitation specialist” had a smarter ring to it. He wasn’t a successful man by most people’s standards and he died drunk in his bed before his fiftieth birthday. Now his daughter was running for the United States Senate and Marty’s words held a new utility for her.
Charlotte hadn’t expected her campaign to begin with an interrogation—an aggressive one at that—but the questions just kept coming.
“Have you ever used any drugs besides pot?”
“No.”
“Paid any undocumented workers under the table?”
“Nope.”
“Ever killed anyone?”
“Not yet.”
“Ever get an abortion?”
“No.”
“Infidelity in your marriage? Affairs? Secret ex-husband?”
“I love my husband. We don’t have anything to hide.” One of those things is true. Charlotte punctuated her sentence with a chuckle, hoping the laughter would sooth her nerves and add confidence to her answer.
Josh Pratt, who if all went well today would sign on to be her campaign manager, twisted his mouth in a way that told Charlotte he wasn’t sure he believed her. He had a tiny blob of something yellow, maybe mustard, on the side of his thin lips. As he asked his questions, Charlotte had a hard time focusing on anything except for the golden dribble.
I’m running for national political office, she wanted to answer back. Ask me my thoughts on immigration, on the flat tax, on school vouchers, abortion rights. How much do I think we can raise the minimum wage? Can I bring more jobs to Pennsylvania? Will I create more affordable housing? Will I fight for college tuition assistance? What do I think about trade with the Chinese? Why does my marriage matter?
“You’re thinking, ‘Why does it matter?’ Why does your husband matter?” Josh read her mind. “Your husband matters. Your marriage matters. As a woman, you bear the burden of having to appear to be charismatic, smart, well-groomed, nice, but not too nice. If you’re married, you need to look happily married. If you have kids, you should be the mother of the year.”
“Goddammit. It’s 2017. There are plenty of women in Congress. A woman ran for president. It shouldn’t matter that I don’t have a penis.” Charlotte rolled her eyes. “It’s unbelievable that we have to deal with that kind of shit anymore.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but it matters a lot.” Josh shot her a stoic stare. “You do still have to deal with this shit. No one likes to say that out loud, but it’s true. You’re running in a state that’s never elected a woman to the Senate or as governor. That should tell you something.”
“Tug Slaughter is a serial philanderer,” Charlotte fired back at Josh. Pennsylvania’s longtime incumbent senator Ted “Tug” Slaughter had been married three times—his current wife was thirty-five years younger than he. The man was a walking cliché. For more than forty years, Slaughter had reigned as the senior senator from the state. Most men in Congress would be easy to miss in a crowd. Not Slaughter. Pushing eighty, the man still oozed raw ego. He was known to strip his shirt off and perform sit-ups onstage at events. Just last month he’d climbed the trestle of the Black Bridge in Marshfield Station with a pack of teenagers and leapt into the icy Delaware River below. Last winter he announced that he donated a kidney to a complete stranger he’d met at an Eagles game.
“It’s true, Tug does more cocktail waitresses than he does lawmaking, but he’s not the one who needs to create a legitimate candidacy. You do.” Josh had an answer for everything.
“That’s bullshit.”
Charlotte drummed her nails on her desktop, an expensive slab of glass through which she could see her boot tapping the wooden floor. She’d flown Josh here to Palo Alto from Philadelphia on her dime to convince him to run her campaign. He’d insisted on first class because he knew she could afford it, and Charlotte took this as a sign that he didn’t think he needed to impress her. All the right people told Charlotte that hiring Josh, a political wunderkind with four consecutive congressional wins under his belt, could give her a solid shot at winning. She needed him more than he needed her money, though she knew that if he said yes to working with her, she would be paying him in the high six figures for a little more than a year.
Josh paused and smiled. “You curse like a dockworker. You don’t look like someone with such a foul mouth, with your expensive linen suit, sitting in this glass-walled aquarium in the heart of Silicon Valley.”
She was suddenly conscious of what she looked like to him. At forty-seven, Charlotte was often complimented on the fact that she had aged well, and she’d heard it enough that she allowed it to be something she took pride in. She had what her mother once described as a plain face and a sturdy build, meaning she had broad shoulders and a flat chest that persisted into adulthood. She knew her hair was her best feature, more chestnut than brown, with strawberry highlights and just a few strands of silver she easily extracted at the roots. After half a lifetime of feeling insecure about her looks, in her thirties she’d learned to accentuate her best features and had come to see herself as pretty but not beautiful. She knew the distinction had made it easier for her to succeed in a male-dominated industry.
Meanwhile, Charlotte thought Josh looked ten years younger than his actual age, which Google informed her was thirty-five and, with his baby face, husky belly, and enthusiastic acne sprinkled across his cheeks, nothing like the kind of man who played the kind of three-dimensional chess required to get a person elected to national office. He wore dark jeans, a blue blazer, pristine Stan Smith Adidas with black laces, and a rumpled Phillies T-shirt. It took swagger to waltz into a business meeting in sneakers with mustard on his face and Charlotte knew it gave him the upper hand.
“Well, I curse more like a teamster,” Charlotte corrected Josh. “I spent too many nights at my dad’s union meetings.” Marty Walsh might have been a drunk, but he’d been a happy drunk, and because happy drunks are endearing to children, like Santa Claus and puppets, from an early age Charlotte had wanted to be around him all the time. On evenings when her mother couldn’t get out of bed, he brought her to his union meetings and sat her on the floor while deeply angry white men—the room was always all men—cursed and complained about how the world owed them better. Years later, at Marty’s funeral, the same men had the same conversations. Back then those men were still progressive Democrats. Mistrust for authority and misplaced expectations had been the central tropes of Charlotte’s upbringing. When she closed her eyes, Charlotte could smell the Swisher Sweets and cheap beer and hear her father say: “These men work hard, Charlie. They deserve a good turn. Anyone who works an honest day deserves a good turn.” He’d had plenty of flaws, but above all Marty had been a hard worker, and it was that quality Charlotte chose to remember above the others.
“That will play well in rural PA—the cursing, the garbageman dad,” Josh said now. “Easy on the union talk though. Only 10.7 percent of Americans identify with a union these days. Play up the white-trash angle. When you run for office, your life history gets reduced to character points: ‘Daughter of trashman turns Silicon Valley executive and comes home to help voters get jobs like hers.’ That’s your brand now. It’s a better brand than ‘California millionaire who grows heirloom tomatoes, contributes to the Silver Circle of public radio, does yoga, and tries to save the spotted owl.’?”
“It’s actually the Chinook salmon we’re more concerned about these days,” Charlotte whipped back.
There were other stories Charlotte could have told Josh. Sometimes Charlotte’s mother, Annemarie, had picked up cleaning shifts at a retirement home in Scranton, scraping vomit off the bathroom walls while wearing thick yellow latex gloves. Unable to afford childcare, she’d brought Charlotte with her, placing the little girl on a stool with a book in the corner of the bathroom. But Annemarie had lost that job when they’d found out she was stealing pills from the patients. Meanwhile, Marty had been among the first laid off when Elk Hollow merged municipal services with Abington. He’d picked up some hours at the gas station before it went self-service. In his later years he’d worked as a janitor in the food services department of the University of Scranton. Some months they’d gotten food stamps that her dad was too proud to ever use at the Rainbow market, even when the electricity got shut off for five days. These were memories Charlotte had packed away into dusty boxes in her brain, and when she’d unpacked them, she’d been startled to realize she’d become the kind of woman who bought fifteen dollars worth of organic kale and thirty dollars of non-GMO chia seeds at the Menlo Park True Food Co-op. The trajectory from there to here was vertigo-inducing.
Charlotte’s eyes wandered to the couch on the other side of the room, where Leila Kelly, her executive assistant, raised her bushy eyebrows in tandem as if to ask, Do we really need this guy?
Josh glanced at his notes and continued. “You and Max Tanner have been married for twelve years, with three daughters under the age of six. You’re the COO of Humanity and he’s the head of engineering and product for the same company. How will that work exactly when you run? What will your husband be doing when you move your family to Pennsylvania?”
“Max is taking a sabbatical from the company and taking care of our girls.”
“Don’t say the word sabbatical. You sound elitist, like the kind of person who says ‘holiday’ instead of ‘vacation.’?”
Sitting in her corner office as the chief operating officer of the technology company that was single-handedly changing how the world did business, Charlotte felt assured in her use of any damn word she pleased. “We call it a sabbatical here at Humanity. We both chose to take one when I decided to run—when we decided I should run. We made a joint decision that Max would help raise our daughters so I could focus on the campaign.”
Charlotte cringed, remembering the intense marital negotiations it had taken to convince Max that her running for office and him becoming the primary caregiver for their small children would be good for them as a family. Even though she understood what he was giving up for her, she also felt vindicated that she deserved this and more from him after what he’d put her through.
“We can talk about how to spin your husband’s so-called sabbatical later,” Josh countered, wagging his head and making exaggerated air quotes with his hands around the word sabbatical. “Maybe Max works on a top secret project from home. Something with virtual reality. People love the idea of virtual reality. They have no idea what the hell it is, but they think it will change their shitty lives. Always say ‘Silicon Valley,’ never ‘San Francisco,’ by the way. San Francisco conjures up images of tie-dyed, pot-smoking, free-loving hippies and transgendered people who want to use your bathroom. ‘Silicon Valley big shot’ is more aspirational than ‘reality television star’ these days, and you and Max hopefully come with less baggage.”
Josh dredged up his next unpleasant topic. “Speaking of baggage, Max has a reputation for being a flirt. There are a few women who claim he made inappropriate remarks to them in the office.”
Adrenaline tiptoed up her spine, but outwardly Charlotte maintained total calm, a skill honed in years of boardrooms filled with other puffed-up men with expensive haircuts.
She took a sip of her lukewarm coffee, allowing her front teeth to clink against her mug. Her husband had been a flirt. It was a reflex for him, the way he made both men and women like him. He made inappropriate, vaguely vulgar jokes at the wrong times. He was a toucher. There was a time, not too long ago, when he would stroll into a team meeting and give both men and women uninvited shoulder massages during pep talks. He used to joke, “An unwanted shoulder massage is an oxymoron.” She’d made him stop telling that joke.
“All men flirt.” Charlotte held her breath and glanced again at Leila. When she made an excuse for her husband, she faltered and raised her voice an octave without intending to. “Do you have any evidence he did anything wrong? No Humanity employees will ever speak badly about Max or me. Everyone signed ironclad confidentiality agreements.”
“How do you know they’re ironclad enough?”
“I wrote them. I’m the COO.” She crossed and uncrossed her legs.
Josh’s chapped lips stretched into a smirk. “People talked to me, and if they talked to me they’ll talk to your opponent and to the press. But you make another excellent point. You have a bigger job than Max. He’s the VP of product and engineering. You’re one step away from the CEO. You run this company.” He waved his hand in an arc sweeping the room, indicating what lay beyond it—the 500,000-square-foot office complex designed by Zaha Hadid, her final project before she passed away. Outside Charlotte’s window she could see the ten-acre rooftop park with its man-made waterfalls and brutalist concrete climbing wall.
Josh continued. “I’ll bet that was tough on Max, having his wife as a boss, the big dog at one of the most powerful companies in the world.”
“My husband is a very evolved man, not a dinosaur.”
Josh rolled his eyes. “That would be a cute sound bite if we were living in Sweden. Don’t say that out loud on the campaign trail.”
He left Max behind for the moment. “Your girls. The twins, they’re five now and you conceived them through IVF?” Josh clearly enjoyed toying with people, had the look of a child dangling a pork chop in front of a starving dog as he asked his questions.
Charlotte allowed her eyes to narrow and her annoyance to rise to the surface. “Yes.”
“Designer babies.”
Don’t talk about my kids like that. I will strangle you with my bare hands. “Oh, Christ! Like hundreds of thousands of women, I had trouble getting pregnant and used modern medicine to help start our family.” Getting pregnant had been the hardest thing she’d ever done. It had convinced her over and over that she was a failure and had nearly broken her. She despised talking about it.
“Because you were old when you got pregnant? Forty-one?”
“Yes, among other things.” Charlotte glared at him. “I’d like to think you know better than to refer to a woman as old.”
Unfazed, Josh continued. “What other things?”
“My uterus sits at an inopportune angle for sperm to properly reach my eggs without assistance. I have sonograms of it, actually. Do you think we should release them on Instagram in advance of announcing the campaign? Maybe they could be our Christmas cards.”
Josh ignored her sarcasm. “IVF is an expensive procedure.”
“The company paid for it.” It was one of the things Charlotte was proudest of—not the fact tha...
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- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication date2018
- ISBN 10 1501179411
- ISBN 13 9781501179419
- BindingHardcover
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Hardcover. Cosmopolitan: "Most Anticipated Books for 2018" Elle: "Best Books to Read This Summer" Goop: "15 Books We're Reading This Summer" People: "Best Summer Books" PopSugar: "25 Best New Books to Put in Your Beach Bag This Summer" Refinery29: "Brilliant Books to Bring to the Beach This Summer" Vulture: "18 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer" "The essential political novel for the 2018 midterms." -Salon "This political novel is comically accurate." -New York Post From Jo Piazza, the bestselling author of The Knock Off, How to Be Married, and Fitness Junkie, comes an exciting, insightful novel about what happens when a woman wants it all-political power, a happy marriage, and happiness-but isn't sure just how much she's willing to sacrifice to get it. Charlotte Walsh is running for Senate in the most important race in the country during a midterm election that will decide the balance of power in Congress. Still reeling from a presidential election that shocked and divided the country and inspired by the chance to make a difference, she's left behind her high-powered job in Silicon Valley and returned, with her husband Max and their three young daughters, to her downtrodden Pennsylvania hometown to run in the Rust Belt state. Once the campaign gets underway, Charlotte is blindsided by just how dirty her opponent is willing to fight, how harshly she is judged by the press and her peers, and how exhausting it becomes to navigate a marriage with an increasingly ambivalent and often resentful husband. When the opposition uncovers a secret that could threaten not just her campaign but everything Charlotte holds dear, she has to decide just how badly she wants to win and at what cost. A searing, suspenseful story of political ambition, marriage, class, sexual politics, and infidelity, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win is an insightful portrait of what it takes for a woman to run for national office in America today. In a dramatic political moment like no other with more women running for office than ever before, Jo Piazza's novel is timely, engrossing, and perfect for readers on both sides of the aisle. "From Jo Piazza, the bestselling author of The Knock Off, How to Be Married, and Fitness Junkies, comes an exciting, insightful novel about what happens when a woman wants it all--political power, marriage, and happiness--but isn't sure just how much she's willing to sacrifice to get it"-- Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781501179419
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